This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी" (Tukaram: For a bedbug a bed is like a castle. so much climbing up and down!)... George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

H. P. Lovecraft: "What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!"

John Gray: "Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter. What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness."

Justin E.H. Smith: “One should of course take seriously serious efforts to improve society. But when these efforts fail, in whole or in part, it is only humor that offers redemption. So far, human expectations have always been strained, and have always come, give or take a bit, to nothing. In this respect reality itself has the form of a joke, and humor the force of truth.”

Saturday, January 26, 2013

"The ascendancy of evangelical Christianity, the demise of the practice of
inter-marriage or cohabitation with Indian wives, and the onset of undisguised
imperial arrogance (once the British had defeated all their military rivals on
the subcontinent) all contributed to the painful termination of the easy
relationship between Indian and Briton that had, by and large, prevailed during
the 18th century."

Maya Jasanoff:

"John Darwin has provided an ambitious, monumental and
convincing reminder that empires are the rule, not the exception, in world
history. What their passage has meant - and will continue to mean - for the
people who live within them remains for others to explore."

Indivar Kamtekar:

"...Check this for yourself.Almost no student, despite high marks in Indian history at school and
university, will be able to tell you, even very approximately, how many
Britishers were actually to be found in India in the colonial period.He or she would have devoted a considerable
amount of time to the study of British rule, would possess a store of other
factual information, and may well be able to debate, quite intelligently, the
character of colonial conquest.But ask
this particular question, and you are likely to draw a blank...

Officials numbered about 12,000 only.These included all the British members of the
Indian Civil Service, the Indian Police, the railways, and the irrigation and
engineering services.The most important
group was thus numerically the smallest.On the basis of these figures, there were more than two thousand Indians
to each Britisher in India.

These figures are seldom, if ever, mentioned in
nationalist historiography.They are
probably kept out of sight with good reason, for the numbers are embarrassingly
small.The remarkable thing about the
British in India was that there were so few of them.Even the Indian Civil Service, of which so
much was heard, had only a thousand officers in all, half of whom were
Indian.An analysis based on such figures
can make imperialism look more like a midget than a monster.But in the nationalist view, the forces of
justice and of good triumphed in India, despite the superior might of the
foreign forces of evil.An Indian David
killed a British Goliath.A fearsome
adversary was overcome.Conveying this
impression requires exaggerating the might of the foreign forces of evil.The story of 1947 has, in the last half
century in India, moved towards precisely this exaggeration..."

As
I have mentioned here earlier, I lived on a tea estate in Assam from
July 1989 continuously for about a year and then intermittently until 1992.

One of the
weirdest things that was practised universally in the tea gardens of
Assam was social segregation of three classes of employees- managers/ executives (few in numbers),
babus/ clerks (quite a few) and labourers (large).

We
were told
not to socialise with the clerks, let alone labourers. That meant, we
were
neither supposed to invite them home nor go to their homes. Only 'executives' were given the membership to the plantation club.

Four-five
labourers were assigned to our modest bungalow as helpers - mali,
bearer, aaya, chowkidar. We did not know how to use bearer and aaya. So
they liked to be posted to our place! As ordained, neither we went to their homes
nor got to know them properly. It was as if they were Neanderthal while we were Homo sapiens!When we were away on vacation in Maharashtra, our chowkidar was murdered while returning home from the night duty.

I
got along well with a couple of
clerks- so well that we occasionally exchanged dirty jokes. One of
them used to tell me a lot about sex lives of rather large looking ducks of Assam as well infidelities of some of tea estate men including current and
past executives. In the streets of the town around our estates, one
came across a few very fair skinned men with light (even blue) eyes.
Apparently, they were offsprings of the past British sahibs!

I would have liked to invite those friendly clerks home for a meal. But I never
did.

We were brown sahibs, continuing the practices started by the British sahibs. Why did the Brits follow such practices?

John Darwin's two books 'After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire', 2007 and 'The Empire Project/ The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970', 2009 are masterly studies of the empires and also provide antidote to the writings of the likes of Niall Ferguson.

David Cannadine says :

"Darwin makes a good point in 'The Empire Project' that some
people do suggest that the Empire is a story of scandal and exploitation that
we should feel guilty about. Other historians of a more right-wing persuasion
think the British Empire is a great story that we should be proud of. Darwin
says it is not really very helpful to keep fighting about whether it was good
or bad because there will never be agreement. Instead the way to move forward
is to try to understand how it worked and why it fell apart. "

Mr. Darwin has a new book out "Unfinished Empire: The
Global Expansion of Britain".

Linda Colley writes in its review:

" Even when Britain's own troops were sparse – in
India before 1770, or in the Caribbean because of disease levels – it often
coped by hiring indigenous troops and slave soldiers to do the dirty work. The
extreme smallness of British numbers in many overseas locations also tended to
reinforce the use of racist distance as a tactic of rule. Keeping the
"natives" (and women) out of certain clubs in imperial settlements
was not just prejudice, but also an attempt to shore up the charisma of the
local dominant white males."

When I read it, I
realised how this 'tactic' was deployed in the tea estates of Assam as late as
in 1980's! Clerks= indigenous troops, slave soldiers= labourers...?

I have known what it was to be a Gora Sahib in India. And I did not enjoy it at all.

British troops man a remote outpost during the Indian
uprising of 1857.

Pages

Will Self: “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one.” John Berger: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Ezra Pound: "Make it new"...Mark Twain: "Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance except plagiarism!... For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”… John Crowley: "Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies; it will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature."...Alexander Waugh: "Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity"...Charles Simic: "There is a wonderful moment when we realize that the picture we’ve been looking at for a long time has become a part of us as much as some childhood memory or some dream we once had. The attentive eye makes the world interesting. A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny." ... Hilary Mantel: “It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons.”… Ingmar Bergman: "It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life"... Graham Greene: "Kim Philby betrayed his country-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?"... Friedrich Schlegel: "Hercules…labored too…But the goal of his career was really always a sublime leisure, and for that reason he became one of the Olympians. Not so this Prometheus, the inventor of education and enlightenment…Because he seduced mankind into working, [he] now has to work himself, whether he wants to or not"... Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.”...W H Auden: "…though one cannot always/ Remember exactly why one has been happy,/ There is no forgetting that one was"...Walter de la Mare: "No, No, Why further should we roam / Since every road man Journeys by, / Ends on a hillside far from Home / Under an alien sky"...Franz Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”..."Over these unremembered marble columns, / birds glide their old remembered way. / Dive in red gold setting tide and write dark alphabets on evening sky /whether an epitaph, chorus or strange augury / little man you only hope to know!"